Read this headline: “To Avoid Repeating Catastrophic Mistake of Iraq Invasion, Senate Bill Would Forbid Attack on Iran Without Congressional Approval.”
Consider these facts:
The Senate voted to let Bush attack Iraq.
So did the House.
The pair of them continue to fund the U.S. military occupation of Iraq to this day.
The pair of them have repeated the same catastrophic mistake — on different scales but indisputably catastrophic — in, among other places, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan, plus tripling in size (now scaled back again) the invasion of Afghanistan.
The U.S. Constitution already does what this bill claims to do.
The War Powers Resolution already does what this bill claims to do.
The U.S. Constitution makes treaties the supreme law of the land, and two of them absolutely forbid invading Iran with or without “Congressional approval.”
The U.N. Charter bans war with very limited exceptions not remotely met here.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact bans war completely.
A Congressionally approved attack on Iran would be exactly as catastrophic as a non-Congressionally approved attack on Iran.
While Congress has no power to legalize a crime, requiring a president to come to Congress before committing that crime could be a means of preventing it only if anyone took Congress seriously.
A Congress led by people who have made clear their commitment never to impeach a president — or for that matter block a Supreme Court nominee — for anything unrelated to sex or to blaming a foreign government for an election cannot be taken seriously.
Spreading the false belief that Congress has the power to legalize an attack on Iran does not benefit Iran, the world, the United States, or Congress.
Progressive media outlets failing to correct that false belief — which could be done with a single sentence — are behaving regressively.
Here is a sentence that could be copied and pasted into thousands of articles: “While Congress can deny a president the power or the funding to wage war, and can impeach and remove war makers, Congress has no ability to make legal what is illegal under the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.”
